Keyvan Nayyeri

Early today I published a blog post on Waegis giving some general statistics about spammer’s country of origin which had some interesting findings that I never could predict before.

While these statistics are approximate but certainly they can reflect the general formation of data to a high extent. As I have stated in the original post, unfortunately spammers feign their characteristics, so it’s difficult to track them based on these characteristics.

However, statistics show that the United States is the top spammer country in the world, and Russia, China and Iran are placed in the second to fourth positions respectively. The results could be predictable as it is something extracted by other researches and studies but the interesting point was the fourth position for Iran in this field.

Knowing the origin of spammers is important for two reasons. The first reason is that the best way to stop spammers is enacting effective laws in all countries that can daunt them. In my opinion this is the most important way that allows us to limit spamming. The second reason to study the origin of spammers is classifying some characteristics that help spam filtering services to stop them.

I had some interesting findings in this statistical examinations. Almost all spammers use their own native language to send spam content but Iranian spammers are the only group that use English language to publish spam content. I guess this is the main reason for other examinees to not be able to recognize Iranians among spammers.

To be honest, this result for Iran was surprising for me. As I’ve written on Waegis, I had seen many spam emails in my junk mail and on Waegis with Iranian names and characteristics but new evidences assured me about that.

Another finding that I elicited from Waegis data was the fact that porn sites are only the target of American and Russian spammers, and Chinese and Iranian spammers focus mainly on promoting businesses and domain ranks.

It would be so important to know why these countries have the vast majority of spammers while other countries don’t participate in this dirty business because knowing these reasons can help to find better solution for spam problem.